


Spiderlings

by Not_You



Series: Eight-Armed Hugs [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Animalistic, Baby Names, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Kid Fic, Natasha Feels, Sickfic, Spiders, Team as Family, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, arts and crafts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 09:10:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3644754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the spiderlings get over their first cold and finally name themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiderlings

Natasha is going to have to keep the girls secret until their development levels out, which it should do soon. She's thinking more about her past than she has in over a decade, and remembering her sisters. So many things are gone or suppressed, but if she goes all the way back to the silk, she can find them. Four other girls, not tiny and not large, just the same size as her. The others had all had auburn hair, though, much darker than Natasha's. Their eyes were lighter, too, a luminous grey-blue.

She likes to stay in the silk when she remembers, because afterward she has to think about how the sister who had the darkest hair and grew to be the biggest died on an early mission, or how the other three had quietly disappeared over the years. It makes her cry, which is even more alien than love. Clint is good about it, at least. He's a human, he understands about leaking from face-holes for no reason.

Now she doesn't have time to cry, because all eight of the Wilsons have acquired some human disease and it involves a lot more effluvia. They're feverish and their throats hurt, and even with a lot of help from their honorary uncles, eight spiderlings is a lot to manage. Clint has been awake for eighteen hours, and Natasha leaps out of a dream of her time in the silk to help him.

"Tiny things," Clint is cooing, slightly hoarse, "tiny things, you are horrible." He has a spiderling in each arm and three on his lap, and all five of them are heavy-eyed and miserable. "O tiny things, how much snot can you hold?" The answer is a volley of sneezes. "That much. I see. You're the worst," he says in tones of deepest affection. "The absolute worst." They manage a weak little giggle at this, and his smile in response lights up his haggard face.

"You're beautiful," Natasha says, collecting tissues and wet wipes to contain the worst of the damage. "Shower," she tells Clint, kissing the back of his neck because it's relatively clean, "sleep."

"Yess'm," he mumbles, and lurches off.

She chuckles, and finishes scrubbing the girls. At least their digestion is fine. Sure, she has to help three of them into the bathroom to use the toilet while Clint showers, but they all manage to crap where they're supposed to, and she's very proud of them. She tells them so, and Clint laughs, sounding slightly hysterical over the water. "Jesus Christ what have we come to, Tasha?"

"Walk it off," she tells him, washing her hands after making sure everyone is clean and has mostly cleared their tiny sinuses of goop, "most people are still changing diapers at this stage."

"Point, but we have octuplets."

"But you're a super-sexy secret agent," she tells him, making all four of the girls giggle again, in between enormous yawns.

"Aaarrrr," Clint growls, "she's a cruel mistress, is the spiderbabe." He dissolves into helpless snickering, barely audible over the water, and the girls laugh again until one of the other four starts crying and Natasha goes out, putting her current armload down on the web and soothing the others, who are cranky and all want juice. She gets each one a chilled bottle of her favorite. There are sixty-four bottles in a fridge of their own, because of course none of the girls ever want the same kind at the same time. Finally her brood is either asleep or sucking down juice, all of them piled in the web. Clint comes shambling in just as she's beginning to worry about him passing out in the shower and hitting his head, and beams down at his children before kissing Natasha and curling up in the other web. He's asleep in a moment, deeply, the way he only does when they're home and safe.

All the time he sleeps, the girls improve. Poor Clint seems to have been on call for the worst of it, and by the time he wakes up the next day, the girls are well enough to play, and just need extra naps and more juice. Clint croaks bitterly about this into his soup, having caught their cold. At least they still have plenty of the gallons of chicken stock Steve has been making them as the cold bounces around the tower, pouncing on anyone physically capable of catching it.

"I hate everyone but Steve," Clint mumbles, picking up his bowl to drink the broth.

"Daddy," two of the girls coo, hugging his legs in perfect tandem.

"Everyone but Steve and my spiders," he amends, stroking their hair. They're still not sure of names, but the girls can be differentiated as Wilsons One through Eight, in the rough order in which they left the egg sac.

"You'll get better," Wilson Three chirps.

"Yeah!" Seven adds, and Clint laughs.

After another three days of nursing Clint and somehow not getting his plague, Natasha calls a family meeting. Everyone sits on the floor in a circle, the girls attentive and licking the suckers they can already be trusted with, big blue eyes trained on Natasha.

"Girls," she says, "you are getting too old not to have names."

They all giggle, but quietly. They understand that this is a serious matter.

"We've thought of a lot of different ones," Clint says, "but at this point we might as well ask you which ones you like."

The meeting goes on for a long, long time. There are a few arguments over which names suit which girls, but at last they're able to draw up a list to put on the birth certificates when the girls level out. Wilson One, who has Natasha's flame red hair and Clint's big ears and serious eyes, is now going to be Rada. Wilson Two is nearly blonde and looks even more like Natasha than the others, and she takes 'Marina.' The issue of middle names will be another headache after they decide on a cover story and a corresponding surname, something Natasha is glad of, watching her daughters painstakingly winnow through their choices. Wilsons Three and Four have red-gold hair and are nearly identical, so she's not surprised when they choose to be alliterative, taking 'Zhanna' and 'Zoya' respectively. Wilson Five is the largest of the girls, and has dark hair like Natasha's dead sister (the one she can be sure is dead) and has those lighter eyes, as well. She names herself Anastasia. 

Wilson Six takes after Clint the most, and chooses 'Oksana.' Wilson Seven is the smallest and shyest of the brood, and she takes forever to name herself Alisa, while Wilson Eight, second smallest and probably the most outgoing, quickly decides to go by Ariadna. It's an exhausting process, but all worth it when their doting uncles come to visit and the girls can tell them their names, delighted with the shiny newness of them. Steve immediately writes each one in the center of its own page in large, pretty cursive, and the girls sit at the table and flop on the floor to embellish them with flowers and flames and rainbows and of course, spiderwebs. Steve works on portraits of the girls and Tony sits at the table and chatters disjointedly into his phone, serving as a booster seat for Ariadna while Zhanna and Zoya and Marina all perch on cushions.

Bruce often treats them like they're made of glass, even after seeing how nasty a fight between two them can get and how far they can fall and not hurt themselves, but he's here too, showing Thor how to make apple bunnies for the spiderlings as Oksana and Rada lurk like puppies, gobbling up bits of peel as well as Thor's many mistakes.

**Author's Note:**

> This entire fic honestly started with this:
> 
> http://www.scarymommy.com/18-crazy-things-i-said-while-up-with-the-baby/


End file.
